The article dispelled a lot of false truths about former Mayor Coleman Young. It also chronicled well the fall of Detroit, from the Albert Cobo administration in the 1950s to Dave Bing’s administration today and all the mayors in between, to where it finds itself today, facing Chapter 9 bankruptcy. It’s painfully obvious that the change the winds of time has brought to Detroit has not been good. Detroit’s faced adversity before and bounced back. Despite that change, when it’s all over said and done, Detroit will have weathered the storm. Detroit has better days and a brighter future ahead!

Thomas A. Wilson Jr.

Detroit

Detroit’s (former) leaders weren’t blind to the city’s problems! They were just like every other unethical politician: They took care of themselves, at the expense of the taxpayers, knowing that they’d be long gone before those chickens came home to roost.

Tom Perkins

Clinton Township

The Free Press is to be commended for its excellent report “How Detroit Went Broke.” The authors gave a professionally objective, data-based review of history while confronting many of the contemporary analyses.

I would hope there will be a similar analysis that focuses on the alternatives of how each of the factors contributing to the city’s bankruptcy can be prevented from recurring, if such is possible. This analysis should include the regional and other issues outside of the control of the emergency manager that must also be addressed if an effective and sustained turnaround is to be achieved in the city of Detroit and other cities in this state and perhaps elsewhere. Any review that ignores the regional issues and the state’s shared culpability for the city of Detroit’s fiscal status will not lead to effective recommendations for sustainable progress.

It would be tragic if, after the expensive turnaround efforts, no long and lasting progress was achieved. Given the political paralysis in Washington, D.C., one must assume that the major burden for impacting and financing the city’s turnaround will have to come from state and local government.

Karl D. Gregory

Southfield

The decline of Detroit comes down to a simple root cause: the lack of the political will of our politicians to make the difficult decisions required during changing economic influences, as well as demography. The blame for the decline must stop, and now leaders must begin to rebuild this great city. It is time to fully embrace what needs to be done to restructure and create a new path for vitality. Detroit is not the only city in crises. Our nation is in a similar dilemma with a lack of political will to fix problems.

Richard Pryce

Farmington Hills

Stephen Henderson can put any kind of spin he wants on how Detroit went broke, but the bottom line is that it went broke because the city lost too many hard-working taxpayers — and that did start with Coleman Young. The mayor’s fiery rhetoric greatly broadened the city’s racial divide and polarized it like never before. He may have been a good money manager, but he was lousy at protecting the source of the money from drying up.

Angelo DiDonato

Macomb Township

Additional tax base revenue left when the city lost its residency requirement. A lot of city employees left the city as soon as the restriction was lifted.

Tera Coleman

Via Freep.com

As a historian of deindustrialization, I was struck by the absence of any discussion of the city’s abandonment by the automobile companies, starting in the 1950s. Thomas Sugrue’s “The Origins of the Urban Crisis” discusses the issue in detail. The principal economic reasons were land values and technology, the latter involving the shift from inefficient multistory plants to automated one-storied facilities. The result was the first great bite into city tax revenues and a rapid decline of African-American employment opportunities given prejudicial transfer policies and racial barriers in suburban housing. This is not Sugrue’s only argument, but the corporations (especially GM and Chrysler) do bear culpability.

Christopher H. Johnson

Pleasant Ridge

There is a massive disconnect there between the numbers presented and the reporters’ interpretation. Coleman Young inherited a shrinking debt, thanks to Roman Gribbs’ policies. Crediting Young with being a good financial manager is laughable. Young’s fiscal policies drove taxpaying citizens and companies out of Detroit. I lived in Detroit through Young’s reign and watched it happen. Dennis Archer, on the other hand, doesn’t get enough credit for slowing the decline, cleaning up a lot of the corruption and featherbedding, and for making Kwame Kilpatrick’s first two years look good.

Michael Edelman

Via Freep.com

This may be history, but that is exactly why it needs to be corrected. I moved to Detroit from Iowa 20 years ago, and have heard over and over that Coleman Young killed Detroit. I doubt this article will change that, but I plan to keep it handy to pass out to everyone who repeats the perceived wisdom regarding Young.

Ken McFarlane

Via Facebook

There are multiple references in this article to “expensive benefits” that made it sound like unions kept getting more and better benefits for their employees. Unions did not. They did their job, trying to maintain the health of their members. That’s the No. 1 job a union has. And they were doing it.

Shelly Lynch

Via Freep.com

Except for the loss of population and the race-baiting and politics, all the other reasons and charts apply to many of the cities in Michigan. The ones that faced reality, made the tough decisions and took action are starting to look better, and the ones that did not are looking at emergency managers or cuts in services.